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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Mark Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on June 5, 1952. He earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1976. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2011); Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007); To the Green Man (Sarabande Books, 2004); Unholy Sonnets (Story Line Press, 2000); Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Iris (Story Line Press, 1992); The Black Riviera (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which won the 1991 Poets' Prize; Far and Away (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1985); The Rote Walker (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1981); and North Sea (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978).

Jarman served as Elector for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine form 2009-2012. During the 1980s, he and Robert McDowell founded, edited, and published the Reaper, a magazine that helped established the movements of New Narrative and New Formalism. Selections from the magazine were published in book form as the Reaper Essays (Story Line Press, 1996). Jarman has published two collections of essays: Body and Soul (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and the Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001). He is also coeditor with David Mason of Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press, 1996).

The poet Edward Hirsch described Jarman's poetry as "God-haunted. [Jarman] writes as an unorthodox but essentially Christian poet who embraces paradox and treats contradiction, to use Simone Weil's phrase, as a lever for transcendence."

Jarman's awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2011, he received the Balcones Poetry Prize for Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, the soprano Amy Jarman.

Body and Soul (University of Michigan Press, 2002)The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001)Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, coedited with David Mason (Story Line Press, 1996)The Reaper Essays, coedited with Robert McDowell (Story Line Press, 1996)

Spell for Encanto Creek

Mark Jarman, 1952

Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
Pooled water, black in shadow, green in sunshine,
With wild olives bending down to drink,
Those figures coming daily to the bridge
To look at their two shadows on your surface,
Keep them returning, keep them coming back.

Mark Jarman

by this poet

Consider how you were made.
Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed
flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets
across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull’s cup.
Consider the first

There they are again. It's after dark.
The rain begins its sober comedy,
Slicking down their hair as they wait
Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,
Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers,
And Jarman, hidden from the cop car
Sleeking innocently past. Stoned,
They

Black Phoebe
Highwayman of the air, coal-headed, darting
Plunderer of gnat hordes, lasso with beak –
"Surely, that fellow creature on the wing,"
The phoebe thinks, "should fly like this."
And loops
His flight path in a wiry noose, takes wing
Like a cast line and hits the living fly

related poems

Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
Pooled water, black in shadow, green in sunshine,
With wild olives bending down to drink,
Those figures coming daily to the bridge
To look at their two shadows on your surface,
Keep them returning

Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
Pooled water, black in shadow, green in sunshine,
With wild olives bending down to drink,
Those figures coming daily to the bridge
To look at their two shadows on your surface,
Keep them returning

Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
Pooled water, black in shadow, green in sunshine,
With wild olives bending down to drink,
Those figures coming daily to the bridge
To look at their two shadows on your surface,
Keep them returning